Bite-sized CPD courses for dental care professionals

10 September 2013

Professor Andrew Eder and Ruth Glover of the
Eastman Dental Institute discuss how they developed a range of ‘podcourses’ to
enable dental care professionals to fulfil mandatory CPD requirements in
bite-sized chunks.

Continuing Professional Development, or CPD, is the
process of lifelong learning which helps to keep a professional’s knowledge up
to date. CPD is compulsory for all members of the dental team and was
introduced for Dental Care Professionals (DCPs) (i.e. all non-dentists in the
dental team, including dental nurses, therapists, hygienists and technicians)
in 2008 – and the levels of CPD required are not trivial. The CPD requirement
for DCPs is 150 hours per five years, 50 hours of which have to be verifiable.

Some people might consider such a requirement to be
an imposition as it’s a time-consuming task for people who’ve already got
full-time jobs (especially if it involves travel to attend a course) and it can
be expensive. However, we wanted to turn it into an opportunity, not least
because it offers significant benefits to patient care. We decided to tackle
both the cost and the time challenges by creating an ‘any time, anywhere’
training option at a reasonable cost, and we came up with the idea of creating
a range of ‘podcourses’ called DCPbites. These are instantly accessible via the
internet from any location and cost just £3.75 each – and because they can be
listened to at any time chosen by the individual, they need not intrude upon a
busy work schedule.

The podcourses begin with a 20-minute podcast. When
we began offering the courses, we only offered audio content, but we then
received a Teaching Innovations Grant which enabled us to create videos to
complement the existing podcasts, because we think these two forms of media are
the most effective means of conveying information. While there are a lot of
magazines and books out there, they’re less easy to digest whilst on the move
and we wanted to offer a solution to people who would prefer not to spend a
huge amount of extra time on this.

After the 20-minute podcast or video, the learner
has to do around 20 minutes’ independent study (usually reading) and then take
a 20-minute, multiple-choice test. They can only complete the course once
they’ve scored 100% on the test, although they can do it as many times as it
takes to get it right. Upon successful completion, participants receive a
verifiable CPD certificate which conforms to the General Dental Council’s
regulations.

When people register for a course, they purchase
credits rather than paying individually per course. You can buy anything from
one credit upwards, enabling large organisations to purchase credits for, say,
1,000 nurses in one go. The potential audience for DCPbites is around 60,000
people, but only about 300 are currently registered. We’d like to grow this
number but it’s hard to obtain funding for PR and publicity, which is what we
need to focus on in order to increase the courses’ exposure. We’re hoping that
DCPs will be attracted by the fact that DCPbites is run by the Eastman Dental
Institute, which has an excellent reputation, and that they’ll then be tempted
to also come and try some of our hands-on courses – we’ve got something of a
head start on this as very few other universities are offering similar
training. Feedback for the existing podcourses has been positive, and so we are
now hoping to be able to invest in creating more video content – and in doing
so, help more DCPs complete their CPD in as simple and stress-free a manner as
possible.

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